Sunday, September 30, 2007

Parsing Greil Marcus Parsing Eminem (and other tangents)


I remember seeing Greil Marcus and Anthony DeCurtis, being interviewed on MSNBC on the issue of Eminem's sick-fuck psychodramas and the failure of nerve on the part of rock and pop critics to call him on the sham, and neither was forthcoming with anything particularly intriguing about the matter. Marcus sort of murmured some mysterious, vague things from his Hegelian shroud, while DeCurtis managed to sound like a nervous, nominally liberal parent who's desperate to stay relevant in his kid's lives. Both sounded like they were skirting the issue. Not the same thing as Lester Bangs taking on the "White Noise Supremacists", attacking the incipient racism that he encountered at the edges of a nervy rock culture. Bang's response was articulate, felt, personal, absent with the detached irony that's become the most popular dodge for rock critics and other commentators to take when there's a chance that they might have to actually say something they care about.

I've read Marcus since 1967, I believe, and I feel I do know him, in a way. Well enough to argue about music with, at least. The best book by Marcus, I think, is Lipstick Traces, when of the rare times where the diffuse nature of his wanderings catches up a subject that is a slippery as his point, the secret history of the 20th century. Linking The Sex Pistols with Guy Debord, Dada, and other instances of spontaneous reaction to the kind of psychic repression good old Frommians harp on is a series of masterstrokes from our author: the deferring of a resolution, the withholding of a thesis, served the book well, in theme and spirit; there is a sense of a dialectic occurring: it doesn't hurt that the writing is inspired.

Less useful are In the Fascist Bathroom, clogged, cryptic, terse bits of incomprehensibility that seems to be an attempt to be more gnomic than Christgau at his most involuted, and Dustbin of History, essays that wander around their subjects of rock, books, the arts, with a commentary that talks around the issues rather than to them. The diffuse style, effective in previous work where there was a strong sense of a cluster of ideas being brought together, here just lets the whole thing dangle like laundry tossed over a bedpost.

The issue of Eminem is about the complete absence of an independent rock and pop commentary in the mainstream media that might have allowed some voices to challenge not just the content of the lyrics, but the entire rationale behind them: Marcus and such, from on high, prefer an indirect course in which to discuss the flow of history, or the reappearance of styles and trends within various cultural matrixes when asked about the sometimes Slim Shady: one rarely comes away with any sense that he thinks someone is any good. Saying yay or nay requires someone to make their case with examples, and it also requires the writer to take a principled stand, one way or the other. Principled stands give us real discussions, from which real understanding arises. The point is about the lack of real criticism of the man's work, and whether the supposed disguise works to any degree one can call artistic. The ass-kissing Eminem has gotten from big media reviewers implicitly states that the Life that's depicted is acceptable because it creates the source of dramatic inspiration. Besides handing Em his head for handing his fans flimsy, dime -store grittiness, critics ought to have the courage to say that the life is just plain wrong, bad, murderous, and to challenge the artist to imagine ways to change the world, not wallow in its ugliness. Critics used to discuss justice as something worth striving for, now it's buck-grabbing assholism that's defended under the stagey business of "detached irony". It's bullshit, and someone as smart as Marcus ought to say so.

Thousands of teens do take this at face value, and they deserve a more diverse, less-lock stepping troupe of critics to read. A critic shouldn't challenge to do better work? This lets musicians with the Million Dollar Bullhorn, whether Eminem, Sting, or Bono, to run their mouths without response. The best critics, regardless of their trade they critique, always take the call the artist to the carpet when less-than-best is offered, and certainly, it's well in their scope to yell bullshit when bullshit stinks up a room. better lyric is part of that equation, inextricable. the issue here isn't Eminem's perceived sins, but rather the over-all pass he's been given by big-media reviewers who offer overheated praise in place of real commentary. Rock criticism used to be critical, as in discussing larger contexts the music exists within. Good critics do this. Good critics would have done more digging in their appraisal of Em's offerings in the marketplace, rather than rely on worn-out auteur theories left over from the heyday of film reviewing. You might insist otherwise, but words inform the music and music drives the text, and both can be discussed, critiqued, analyzed--i.e., subjected to the sort of dissection that real criticism attempts -- with no disservice to the form.

The cynical among us would debunk the assertions of writers like Marcus (or Dave Marsh) who remain hung up on rock and roll symbolism and maintain that a loud guitar is a loud guitar, not a tool of patriarchal oppression. A loud guitar is a political tool of the left or the right. Woody Guthrie's guitar had the motto "This machine kills fascists" scribbled on it, Elvis's guitar was a symbolic revolt against a previous generation's sexuality, Townsend's power chords made dying young before growing old seem like an option one might consider: all these things are political in the broadest sense in as much as the move of rock and roll is to move people into some kind of state that's transforming: you want an audience to understand their world differently than they did before the music started playing. How well artists succeed at this, whatever their expressed intent, makes for valid, intriguing criticism Besides, what constitutes a music's "validity as music" has lot of things within that hazy phrase to discuss, and certainly bringing a light on the success of rendered political stances within the "role-playing" , and considering whether these things actually do anything that works musically is not beyond a critic's job description

Friday, September 28, 2007

A self-righteous snit.


Slate writer Jonah Weiner was all in a dither this week writing about film maker Wes Anderson's emphasis on white people as principle protagonists, and for what he considers the director's patronizing attitude toward nonwhite. He does a crackerjack job of working himself into an rude lather, and comes perilously near to calling Anderson racist in his movies. As evidence he cites Danny Glover's character in The Royal Tennebaums,a black man who was bookish, civil, bumbling, soft spoken and a drab, rumpled dresser, as well as the black shipmate in The Life Aquatic who plays David Bowie tunes on an acoustic guitar and sings them in Portuguese. Weiner strips his threads as he rummages through his old literature books on post-colonial theory and produces a strange, hypervenilating rant. What I sense is a bad case of someone not getting it, or at least not grasping the crisp irony of Anderson's not always successful brand of satire.


Frank Lentricchia, a renowned professor of literature and critic, wrote an article for the late publication Lingua Franca in which he bemoaned the situation of political cant trumping an analysis of what a given novel is actually about. To paraphrase, Lentricchia wrote that while he was lecturing on Don DeLillo's novel White Noise, a student complained that the book was racist. He asked what was racist about DeLillo's book. The student replied that the book was racist because there were no people of color in the narrative. Lentricchia responded by saying that the novel was about white people and the white world in which they lived, but observed that the student was unsatisfied. The inference is that the student was, for the time being, incapable of getting to the heart of DeLillo's satire, and that it would be years, perhaps, before experience chipped away at the certainity that buffers both the heart and the funny bone.

I sympathize with Lentricchia's exasperation over his nay saying student's knee jerk response to the book, and I'd advance Jonah Weiner's Wes Anderson hand -wringing article as another example of someone advancing a mouldy heap of retreaded Saidisms as thoughtful objection. Anderson is obnoxious in many ways, but what he does get right in his films is the peculiar naivete many white people display in their interactions with blacks, Asians and Hispanics, bringing with them a culturally loaded package of assumptions that aren't easily changed.

It's a low key, shoulder slumping satire that he's advancing here, reducing his Caucasian protagonists to a stylized set of minimalist ticks that expose their lack of true worldliness. That he doesn't create non white characters of heroic virtue , slowly and silently suffering the moronic jabs of their white counterparts, is pretty much the point here, and it's to Anderson's credit that he maintains the deadpan style through out his films. There is , as well, something flatly paternal in Weiner's argument, which is marmish and prim in it's lecturing mode, implying that it's immoral for a white man to create nonwhite characters who are just as offbeat, quirky and defying of stereotypes as their white counterparts. It's paternal in the sense that he is demanding that nonwhites maintain their dignity overall, that they never be cast in any sense that can be construed as ridicule. This is slave owner thinking, and that issue is not his to fight. I suspect that Glover appreciated the chance to play a character.

The point is to show up the failings of his white characters as they pursue their various delusions, whether a new claim to fortune or mythical sharks; his films are slide shows, not lectures on race relations. While I think Anderson's work is uneven, certainly, I am relieved that he has no desire to become a latter day Norman Lear.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

James Carter's crisp, serpentine saxophone work



JC on the Set
-- James Carter
w/ Craig Taborn / Jairbu Shahid / Tani Tabbal
Carter has a fat, honking sound on all the saxophones he uses, and this a good thing. He phrases wonderfully, and there is sass and a fast-quipping edge here, particularly in the galvanizing solo he takes on Ellington's "Caravan"; honks, blorts, grunts and street-crossing jabber make you think of a flurry of voices all singing into the same microphone. Ellington had made a name for arrangements that suggested "jungle sounds" ( so called by critics who at the time still couched their praise in racist vernacular) , Carter keeps his notes crisp, sharp as pressed pleat or a knife's edge, nuance and edges of melodic creation and destruction timed with the lights of the Big City, a blues full of the funk of the city. Funk Carter has, as in the fatback workout of the title track. Did I mention that he lays out and reconfigures ballads with a rare artistry?

This he does with the distanced eye of painter views a blank canvas and a palette of fresh paint. It's less important that he captures , after much labor and sweat and the simula-cara of agony, some questionable approximation of inner essences residing in the sweet notes that make up the melody than what he does to create new forms. There's a joyful aspect to Carter's playing that's perfectly contagious when he takes on the slower, more reflective tunes, and here one might guess that his soul is transformation, transcendence, recovering, a full swing of moods that he journeys through in order to regain the light of day. The playing on his exploration is marvelous, bubbling, never tentative.

Carter excels here because he isn't afraid to mess with the material; these slow pieces are less sacred objects than they are sources of inspiration. One thinks that Carter's hand will come out of the bell of his sax and pull your face into it. That's a coarse image image, perhaps, but it's another way of saying that the tone and phrasing are in your face (in the most pleasant way , of course), and is the sprite and fulsome virtuosity that won't let you ignore the grace and occasional genius emerging from the horn. The brunt of this man's playing is full bodied blues and bluster. Nice stuff.

Some Notes On T.S.Eliot On His Birthday.


T.S.Eliot wrote in a time when the Universe seemed to be rent, with heaven and hell bleeding into one another, a career on the heels of two world wars that shattered optimism one may have had for the promise of technology to replace a silent god, is hardly different that the dread that lurks under the covers of the post modern debate over language's ability to address anything material, or have it convey ideas with any certainty. There is simply the fear that the names we give to things we think are important and worth preserving are, after ball, based on nothing. Grim prospects, that, but Eliot, I think, seeks to provoke a reader's investigation into the source of the malaise, the bankruptcy of useful meaning, with a hope that the language is reinvigorated with a power to transform and change the world.
Eliot's response was real art though, and if it did turn into resignation and nostalgia for more-meaningful past times, his articulation at least provokes a response in the reader, and operates as a challenge for them to make sense of his language, and understand the complexity of their own response. This adheres to Pound's modernist ideal that art ought to not just be about the times in which it's made, but that it needs to provoke a response that changes the times: transformation remains the submerged notion.
There is beauty because there is power in the imagery and the emotion behind it and it's powerful because it rings true; a reader recognizes the state of affairs Eliot discusses with his shimmering allusions, and responds to it. The material does not lie, and he certainly isn't being false by saying "this is my response to our time and our deeds". Rather, it's more that one disagrees with Eliot's conclusion, that all is naught, useless, gone to ashes. Better that one inspects the power of the truth that is in the work and develops their own response to their moment. It's less useful to try and argue with someone's real despair. A depressed expression does not constitute lying.
Eliot was not lying in any sense of the word--lying is a willful act, done so with the intent of trying to make someone believe something that is demonstrably untrue. As the point of The Quartets and his plays have to do with an artful outlaying of Eliot's seasoned ambivalence to his time, the suggestion that "beauty lies" is specious. One has license to argue with the conclusions, or to critique the skill of the writer, but the vision here is not faked dystopia Eliot contrived to a good amount of trendy despair--that comes later, with artless confessional poets who lost any sense of beauty to their own addiction to their ultimately trivial self-esteem issues. Eliot, however one views him, sought transcendence of what he regarded as an inanely short-sighted world, and sought to address the human condition in a lyric language that has, indeed, found an audience that continues to argue with his work: the work contains a truth the readership recognizes. Eliot was following suit on the only prerogative an artist, really, has open to them: to be an honest witness to the evidence of their senses, and to marshal every resource in their grasps to articulate the fleeting sensations, the ideas within the experience.
This is the highest standard you can hold an artist to; any other criteria, any other discursive filter one wants to run the work through is secondary, truth be told, because the truth within the work is the source of that work's power. One need to recognize what it is in the lines, in the assemblage and drift of the lyric, in the contrasted tones and delicate construction of vernaculars, what is that one recognizes and responds to in the work, and then mount their response.
There is more to the Four Quartets or the plays than what assume is an admission of defeat in the hard glare of uncompromising , godless materialism--there is hope that his work inspires future imagining greater than even his own-- but I cannot regard the poems as failures in any sense, even with the admission that there is great beauty in them. Eliot renders his consciousness, his contradictory and ambivalent response to the world he's grown old in with perfect pitch, and it's my sense that his intention to provoke the imagination is a sublime accomplishment. As craft and agenda, the later pieces work.
What does Eliot's despair have to do with postmodern writers and writing? It's less about what one can call his "despair" than what his operating premise has in common with the post modern aesthetic: Eliot, the Modernist poet extraordinaire, perceives the world the universe has having any sort of definable center, any unifying moral force formally knowable by faith and good works. There is despair in the works, behind the lines--one responds to them emotionally and intellectually--and the power behind the images, the shimmering surfaces the diminished, de-concretized narrator feels estranged from, comes from a felt presence, a real personality. Eliot, though, turns the despair into a series of ideas, and makes the poetry an argument with the presence day. There is pervasive sense of everything being utterly strange in the streets, bridges over rivers, strangeness at the beach, and we, it sounds, a heightened sense of voices, media, bombs, headlines competing for the attention of someone who realizes that they're no longer a citizen in a culture where connection to a core set of meanings, codes and authority offers them a security, but are instead consumers, buyers, economic in a corrupt system that only exploits and denudes nature, culture, god.

Eliot conveys the sense of disconnection rather brilliantly, reflecting the influence of an early cinematic editing styles: Eliot is a modernist by his association with the period, though at heart he was very much a Christian romantic seeking to find again some of the scripture’s surety to ease his passage through the world of man and his material things. There has always been this yearning for a redemption of purpose in the vaporous sphere, and much of his work, especially in criticism, argued that the metaphysical aspect could be re-established, recreated, re-imagined (the operative word) through the discipline of artistic craft. Modernists, ultimately, shared many of the same views of postmodernism with regards of the world being a clashing, noisy mess of competing, unlinked signifiers, but post modernism has given up the fight of trying to place meaning in the world, and also the idea that the world can be changed for the better. Modernists, as I take them in their shared practice and aesthetic proclamations, are all romantics, though their angle and color of their stripes may vary. Romanticism, in fact, is an early kind of modernism: the short of it is that there is a final faith in the individual to design of the world, and in turn change its shape by use of his imagination
Eliot's turn to religious quietism isn't so surprising, given the lack of self-effacing wit in his writing that might have lessened the burden of his self-created dread of the modern world: a tenet of modernism, shared by any writer worthy of being called so, is that their work was to help the readers, the viewers, the audience, perceive the world afresh, from new perspectives, in new arrangements, to somehow help get to the "real" order of things behind their appearances, and, understanding, change the world again. Temperaments among poets varied as to how they personally responded to their need to live aesthetically--and in all cases, living aesthetically was a viable substitute for a religious rigor--Stevens chose his Supreme Fiction while being an insurance executive, Pond toyed with fascism and economics, Joyce opted for a life in the eroticized parlors of France and Britain, Williams found connection through his medical practice and biology, related, absolutely with his poetry. Over all, what keenly separates the modernist engagement with meaning creation was that it was the things of this world, this plain, this material reality, that were the things that would help us transform individual perception; the thing itself is its own adequate symbol. A nod to Husserl and phenomenology, the meaning of things in the world, as things, was mysterious indeed, but their form didn't come from the mind of a God who, at best, was an absent landlord. Eliot, though, sought religion, and I don't see that as a failure at all: the work is too powerful to be regarded as either a personal failure, if that's a claim one might, nor as a poet. Eliot, as you say, is a poet of ideas, among other things, but ideas are useless in a poem unless they're seamlessly linked with an emotion, an impulse, and it's possible, I think, to see where the work was going: the kind of world Eliot described, with the kind of intelligence and personality that described it, was a bleak and unlivable sphere, requiring a decision, to commit to something that supplies meaning, fits the personality that needs direction. I don't regard Eliot as artifact at all: I've commented previously on how the work still inspires readers to engage the world in new ways: he is a permanent influence on my work as a poet.

The early modernists rejected the romantic label--for a variety of reasons.  I'm sure they had good reasons, but Modernism, in many respects, is an old project with a new label. Can  we really place Joyce and the Futurists and Eliot and Pound and Yeats and Gertrude Stein, Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the same box?  Yes, but it is less of a box and more of a tent; there is a lot more room t

Monday, September 24, 2007

Trio Fascination

TRIO FASCINATIONS--Joe Lovano
The cd Trio Fascination by Joe Lovano is playing, and it's almost enough to make you think that the morning will yield a good day after all. Foolishness, because it's the only 8:30AM, and nothing says denial like someone typing rapidly as if they're trying to keep the psychic tax collector a least three paces behind him. Mornings are the best time for writing because the mind is sufficiently empty of presumptions, leaving one free to pursue strange ideas and expressions without having to parry with the dual vanities that one might be right or wrong in the attempt to say something new. But back to Lovano, whose command of tone and vocal simulacra on his saxophone makes you think that there are conversations about good and graceful matters among the birds in the trees. He never wanders far from the blues, does not get strident for the sake of some spurious avant gard credentials; it's the playing that matters, it's the playing and the steady, perfect stream of ideas that remain with you when the session is over. Dave Holland and Elvin Jones firm up this pianoless trio, with Jones, in particular, laying out an unreal orchestration of rhythms, beats, and quirky articulated pulses; he sustains a dialogue of percussion across his dread heads and cymbals, and offers a swift and swirling set of waves for the superlative Holland to ride with his bass work, carrying Lovano to the further reaches of melody. Lovano jabs, darts, smears and mashes his lines in peculiar and angular phrases over the swing of the up-tempo numbers, and comes off as subtle, supple colorist on the ballads. This is one intricate weave of improvisation, scratchy and abrasive that lightly touches on the edge of dissonance; something about Lovano's indirect approach to a melodic inversion reminds me of the full scale stretches of spontaneous composition by Wayne Shorter in the years he succeeded John Coltrane in the Miles Davis Quartet, in that he wasn't one to fill a solo with the exhaustion of every scale and key one was capable of. Shorter used space and silences, building his solos with a majesty that made them seem composed beforehand. Lovano, a shade less verbose than Shorter, shapes, and molds his flights as well, entering a solo stretch from every vantage except straight on. This is the sound of surprise.

Friday, September 21, 2007

A beaut of poem by Paul Guest


Paul Guest has a new poetry collection that’s been recently released, Notes for My Body Double<, from which someone on an online poetry forum posted this poem. It’s a beaut:

NOTHING
by Paul Guest
Between Buck Owens and Vivaldi what’s left
to listen to but the stars, so I do, dialing
the radio down to indeterminate static,
what I always thought was absence, an aria
of sizzling nothingness. Instead
it’s the Milky Way radiating arrhythmia
all the way back. It’s gossip
of the vacuum. That nothing has never been
truly nothing is why I believe,
even still, in love. Beside two rivers
I have lived nearly all my life
and these beneath one sky
muttering its endless alphabet of sine waves.
Jupiter with its flock of moons
and the stone from which we hope
to squeeze one drop of water,
red Mars pulsing in the blank field of night—
I’ve wanted to leave Earth
behind, gravity’s orphan at last,
but not Earth with its two good seasons and two bad
and not its angel-winged clams
luminous in the mud bed of a river
so distant from me
I can’t remember where
that water is, except that I’ve dreamed it,
except that in it I sank
all the way down.



A wonderful choice here. Our old friend Paul Guest writes in a way wherein he manages to be a poet without obviously luxuriating in the vanity of being a poet. "Nothing" is like an inspired discourse from a friend who is moved to share what's been maturing in their thoughts for awhile; the phrases, the rhythm of the strophes, the analogies, the direct and indirect digressions are seamless. In these instances one is wise to be quiet and witness an uncommon verbal dexterity. This is a bright and wonderful weave of wonderment.

He does so by letting on an incident a young boy might do, recently informed of and intrigued by that radio signals carry out into space. Searching for life beyond our understanding on the radio dial is a marvelous idea, and Guest does well with careful word choice, sharp , precise phrasing; how he manages to avoid klutzy , pretentious language and still have this poem resound on several levels of implication is evidence of a man who understands that free-verse needs to be crafted no less than metered verse. That he does this without straining for effect, as in the now-formula ironies of Billy Collins just makes me smile.

You know all about Coleridge's notion of the "suspension of disbelief", of course, and his idea that the poet seeks a "dramatic truth", a poetic insight, quite apart from material fact. The issue isn't whether Paul Guest ignores the limits of an undetermined plausibility factor but rather he exceeds a reader's expectations as he does so.

I think he does so splendidly, and a key element of his success has been his avoidance of High Literary Rhetoric. The particular issues he leaves to the the specialists to wonder about; the Saganites and the Bergsonians can worry among themselves as to the limits of space or the capacity of the imagination to make connections beyond what's materially verifiable. This poem is evidence of what poet's don't do well often enough, musing. There isn't a phony word or emotion anywhere that I can detect. Paul Guest has managed to disarm most of us of our objections with his skill and boarded us onto this imaginative stream of associations.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

On the Road: A trip through America Unscathed by Thought


On the Road is a book one ought to read , I think, in order to know something of a part of a generation responded to the post- WWll experience, and with any luck one does not stop there, thinking they've read the definitive book of the time. Other Beat writings are more crucial, especially Howl by Allen Ginsberg, one of the great American poems of the 20th century; in line, rhythm, imagery, and the contrasting and clashing elements of rage, despair and eureka! quality laughs, Ginsberg's poem supersedes the best of Kerouac's prose and and is a fully convincing evocation of the deadened conformity of 50s culture that agitated and motivated he and his fellow writers Kerouac had some intuitive notion of spontaneous community when it came to he and his friends bumming around the roads in a variety of heisted cars, trying to live on the kind of wits that fire up only in the face of near disaster. It's the community of the foxhole, a world with a bond that's intimate, understood instantly, without words, a bond that's held onto due to the members' sense that their lives depend on it. Lives do depend on the bond, in literal foxholes, but this mindset was something Paradise and his boys carried around with them, wherever they went, a thinking that innoculated the travelers from whatever elements, textures, values the local scene might have on them.

They were always passing through, resisting change, impulsively impervious to nuance, being themselves wherever on the map they stopped for a period; these were the same personalities in Denver that started in New York, and fairly much the same assortment of tics and tells by novel's end. On the Road might be considered the first post modern novel, in that America is seen as merely stops along the way, with the final destination being the edge of the earth the characters seemed to be looking for, that blankness beyond the road signs and small town bars where the silence and serenity they sought can absorb them and quiet the chattering noise in there heads. It is post modern in the sense that for whatever adventures these guys have, no seems touched by anything except the brief satisfaction of their own drunkeness, rant or sexual release; nothing effects them, nothing changes them, they are , like all unhinged signifiers, unmoved.

It did turn into a worthwhile project for later writers to examine the surface presentation of American culture and reveal it in conflict with the collective desire for a metaphysics of presence, but Kerouac only gives a brief hint to the uglier and more comic possibilities of the terrain he happened upon.His short fall was in making Sal Paradise such a flitty motormouth, a man who notices everything about him and yet cannot describe what he notes in memorable language. This is a book about a man trying to outrun himself.

Since writers are in the habit of making up stories as a matter of habit and profession, each of them, not just the beats, "faked" everything. That shouldn't be surprising from a class of folks we look to for tales, fables, metaphors and such that we might use , in some loose way, in making our own lives fit our skins better. The question is how well ,uhhhh, how artful one is in manipulating language towards the creation of fiction or a poetry where the world as its spoken resounds with suggestion and portents of secret knowledge. Some Beat writers I like, and consider brilliant, like William S. Burroughs. He was the one stone-cold genius in the bunch, was the most interesting and successful destroyer and re-creator of literary form, and maintained what Mailer called a "gallows humor" that allowed him to explore the gamier side of human personality without mythologizing the journey. Ginsberg's early poems , as well, were filled with the bulls-eye hitting jeremiads that were such an exact fit for the condition he described that it still comes off as a fresh and blistering criticism of a culture that seems interested in no more than conformity. Fakery is what one expects and demands from creative writers. Beat enthusiasts might blanch at the notion, but comes down to the skill of the writer to get away with the imaginative tall tales he's putting forth. It's about how well controls their technique in the construction of the lie we might want to invest in for a period.